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Thursday, September 4, 2014

Compared to the UPA-style paralysis, there are some welcome signs of
movement with the new government, but its direction remains, at best,
unclear, if not worrisome. It is good to see a leader with conviction,
but we are already treading the thin line between decisiveness and
authoritarianism

It is unfair to judge a new government and a new leader in just 100 days.
It is silly to assess the changing mood of the nation or the state of
the polity so soon after a landmark electoral verdict. Yet, there is
something we can do. We can notice a pattern in the priorities of the
government, see the direction of the new regime, say something about the style of the new leader and make an intelligent guess about future politics.

Going by this, the first 100 days of the Narendra Modi government offer
more worries than hope. Compared to the United Progressive Alliance
(UPA)-style paralysis, we see some welcome signs of movement. But the
direction of this movement remains, at best, unclear, if not worrisome.
It is good to see a leader with conviction, but we are already treading
the thin line between decisiveness and authoritarianism. A government
that lacks a clear direction and an Opposition that lacks political will
or wisdom threaten to deepen the political vacuum in the country.

Active foreign policy

Let us begin with the positives. A new government always kindles hopes and the Prime Minister’s utterances
have as yet not doused popular hopes. His speech in the Central Hall
and Independence Day address were not visionary, but it was a relief to
see a Prime Minister who looked into the eyes of his people and spoke
his mind. He was down to earth, appeared to be outside the power elite
of Delhi, was concerned with issues that affect people in their everyday
life and seemed willing to rise above the petty politics of a blame
game. This powerful communication appears to have made up for his
reluctance to face the media. And if opinion polls are anything to go
by, his popularity and image have received a boost that every incumbent
Prime Minister enjoys early on.

The real question is: how do his utterances translate into action? This
is where things get muddy. The one area where the new government has
been somewhat inexplicably active is foreign policy. And there are many
things to commend here: the invitation to the leaders of the South Asian
Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) for the Prime Minister’s
swearing-in ceremony, the toning down of the imperious attitude towards
Nepal and a willingness to stand up to first-world bullying at the World
Trade Organization (WTO). At the same time, the new government has
diluted further our principled stand on Palestine, is unclear about what
it wishes to do with BRICS and keeps sending conflicting signals about
Pakistan. There does not seem to be a coherent strategy underlying the foreign policy activism of the Modi government.

Electoral promises

Much was expected on the economic front of the government that promised
everything to everyone in the run-up to the election. The problem here
is not a lack of coherence but that the emerging priorities of the
government do not square up with its declared intent. More than the
Union Budget — rightly described as a UPA-III budget — the government
has unveiled its economic policy through a series of specific decisions.
The willingness of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to make a U-turn on
its earlier opposition to foreign direct investment (FDI) in defence,
railways and insurance shows its priorities. That’s why a section of business seems to be happy and hopeful about this regime.

But there is very little visible action on some of the big ticket and
high decibel electoral promises. Mr. Modi had promised nothing short of
controlling inflation and providing jobs to everyone. Inaction on these aam aadmi concerns
does not augur well for a government whose commitment to the poor is
already suspect. In fact, the new government has gone back on some
specific promises made to the aam aadmi. The BJP has already
reneged on its manifesto promise to revise the Minimum Support Price on
the lines suggested by the Swaminathan Commission, viz., cost
plus 50 per cent. The proposed dilution of the Land Acquisition,
Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act would reinforce the impression that
farmers do not quite figure as a priority of this government.

On futuristic sectors like the environment and education, it’s plain bad
news so far. The government is keen to go back to the old days of
growth-at-any-cost, throwing all environmental caution to the wind.
Hasty clearance for increasing the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam and
the Ken-Betwa river linking project are mere symptoms of systematic
damage to the regime of environmental protection carefully put together
over the years. Forest clearance norms have been relaxed, pollution
standards have been diluted, the autonomy of the National Board for
Wildlife has been compromised, and attempts are afoot to downgrade the
Green Tribunal.

On education,
it is not clear if the government has begun to understand the enormity
of the challenge in this sector. Forcing schoolchildren all over the
country to stay back in order to listen to the Prime Minister on
Teacher’s Day is no way to begin addressing the challenge of quality of
education in the post-Right to Education (RTE) era. Occasional forays
into higher education without a road map threaten to make an already bad
situation much worse. While the government has not officially endorsed
any of the loose talk about changing the curricula, the noise may have
already begun to induce self-censorship, and thus curb innovation and
creativity.

Religious harmony

One of the biggest fears associated with this government was its
hostility to diversity, especially religious diversity. While the Prime
Minister has been careful not to say anything that would accentuate this
fear, the trouble is that he just has to be himself to make the
minorities feel uneasy. Given his image, the Prime Minister not hosting iftaar acquires
more weight than his conciliatory words about communal harmony. The
context of rising communal tension, especially in election-bound States,
suggests that the arena of action has shifted outside the government.
There appears to be crowd sourcing of communalism, with occasional and
strategic help from the Sangh Parivar. An obsession with the short-term
objective of winning Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and at least the
Jammu region in Jammu and Kashmir has made the ruling party oblivious to
the long-term cost of communal polarisation to the idea of India, and
indeed to this regime itself.

Challenge of governance

The immediate and crucial test for Mr. Modi is going to be the challenge
of governance. He of course enjoys a headstart over the UPA-II
government — that lost legitimacy for being both corrupt and
inefficient. It is natural that routing measures of administrative agility and efficiency
like ensuring attendance of government employees win popular approval.
The trouble would begin when people start demanding outcomes. As of now,
the government has not shown much resolve to stand by its commitment
towards a corruption-free government. This government appointed the
Supreme Court mandated Special Investigation Team (SIT) on black money
over which the UPA government had dragged its feet, but it seems to have
forgotten its promise of getting black money back to the country within
the first 100 days. The removal of Mr. Sanjiv Chaturvedi from the post
of Chief Vigilance Officer (CVO) of the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences (AIIMS) showed that the government failed an early test of
integrity.

Can Mr. Modi reverse these early signs and defy his critics? He clearly
has time on his side. And he still has public support, if he is willing
to learn and change. This is where the heart of the problem lies. The
Prime Minister, the Leader and the Party Boss all rolled into one is
closed to anything and anyone that can make him learn and change. He
does not respect the autonomy of institutions like the Supreme Court. He
does not allow procedures and norms to come in the way of what he
wills, as in the case of the appointment of his Principal Secretary.
Voices of dissent, whether in the Opposition or from within his party,
are not welcome. Even Ministers are subject to strict surveillance.
Loyalty must be rewarded even if it means retaining tainted ministers
and making Mr. Amit Shah the head of the BJP. These are not signs of
authority but that of authoritarianism.

Bad signals from the ruling party do not translate into good news for
the Opposition either. The success of the incumbent Congress in the
recent by-polls in Uttarakhand and Karnataka may have been illusory. The
success of the grand anti-BJP alliance in Bihar is no more than a
tactical victory; in the long run, it is going to help the BJP
consolidate its newly acquired political support. In the first 100 days
we have seen a government, warts and all. But we have not seen much of
an Opposition. The remaining 1,725 days offer space for a true and
principled Opposition, for alternative politics.

(Yogendra Yadav is a Member of the National Political Affairs
Committee and the National Executive of the Aam Aadmi Party. E-mail: yogendra.yadav@gmail.com)